Did you really think a little eye infection was going to stop Bob Costas?

This is the Olympics, the ultimate test of strength and stamina, and Sochi marks Costas’s 10th straight Games holding down NBC’s prime time hosting gig.

The American people will not be denied.

They may, however, be a little freaked out.

Many viewers were startled on Thursday night when Costas kicked off his Sochi Olympic coverage wearing glasses, while his left eye appeared half-shut and slightly twitchy.

“Bear with me for a moment as I spare my friends in the press office countless inquiries,” Costas said at the top of the broadcast. “I have no choice to go all Peabody and Sherman on you for the next couple of nights since I woke up this morning with my left eye swollen shut and just about as red as the old Soviet flag. According to the NBC doctors here, it’s some kind of minor infection, which should resolve itself by the weekend.”

The infection means Costas can’t wear his customary contact lenses. But the show must go on, so he just has to roll with it.

Such is the life of the live-TV host.

“I feel his pain,” said James Duthie, who was one of the hosts of CTV’s London 2012 Olympics coverage. “It’s the nature of our business that the first thing people see is how you look. You could deliver some eloquent, two-minute speech about some important topic and then you get off the air and people tweet you, or your Mom will call you and say, ‘You had a weird piece of hair sticking up.’”

Duthie, who has been a host at TSN for more than 15 years, has never had to work with an eye infection but he has dealt with other blemishes, from big bags under his eyes to once doing an entire broadcast with the paper collar from the makeup chair still tucked in his shirt.

Once, while hosting SportsCentre alongside Darren Dutchyshen, Duthie lost his voice and found the only thing that helped sustain it was to eat soft foods, like bananas and yogurt.

“I had this giant vat of yogurt on the desk and about eight bananas and literally every time Dutchy was talking I was scooping yogurt in my mouth because it was the only thing that soothed my throat. It would only work for about two minutes, but it was enough,” he said. “I was almost throwing up by the end of the show because I was gorging myself.”

People will always notice how you look before they hear anything you say, Duthie said.

“So I feel for Bob, but he was pretty pro the way he handled it.”

Duthie isn’t the only one who knows about the power of appearances.

“When you work in television, you can get things wrong, you can make mistakes, but you can’t change your appearance,” said Jennifer Hollett, who spent three years as a MuchMusic VJ. “This is what upsets viewers the most.”

If Costas were in any other industry, he’d just call in sick. But as a TV host, you don’t get to be sick, she said.

“I can only imagine, as a host of the Olympics it’s not even on the table.”

The reaction to Costas’s infected eye on social media — when you typed his name into Google on Friday, “eye” was the next predictive word — shows the level of obsession people have with TV personalities, Hollett said, likening it to when CBC News anchor Peter Mansbridge endured a similar uproar when he sported an uncharacteristic beard while reporting on the blackout in the summer of 2003.

Mansbridge had been on vacation when he was roused to duty and didn’t have time to shave his face.

“It says a lot about the parasocial relationships we have with TV hosts.”

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